Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Testing Group-Level Differences in Political Decision-Making

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Citizens entrust elected officials with the power to make important decisions. Elected officials are supposed to lead as well as to represent their constituents in part because direct democracy is impractical for a large country. What are the consequences of indirect representation? If ordinary citizens made policies, would their decision making processes and choices differ from elected officials' processes and choices? Through an innovative experimental design, this project tests the extent to which elected officials and everyday citizens differ in their decision-making. The contexts or situations of decision-making for elected officials and everyday citizens are distinct, but in general, their decision-making abilities should not differ. Thus, the question is whether elected officials and everyday citizens are equally affected in their decision-making by the same contexts. This project focuses on two contexts familiar to elected officials: accountability for one's decisions and situations with high stakes and consequences. The project tests the proposition that individuals who experience lower levels of anxiety in contexts of accountability and high stakes are best able to learn from new information. To this end, the project examines the effects of anxiety on the quality of decision-making among both elected officials and ordinary citizens. The main hypothesis is that elected officials' experience with decision-making to lead to lower average levels of experienced anxiety. Thus, elected officials' patterns of information-seeking and learning from information should be less affected by contexts of accountability and high stakes, as compared to everyday citizens' patterns of information search and learning in the same contexts. To test these hypotheses, the project uses a computerized information board, which describes a series of hypothetical public policy problems and lists potential options that could solve them. A total of 400 participants are sampled equally from two groups, everyday citizens sampled from the general adult populations of Minnesota and elected officials serving in Minnesota at the state and local level and are asked to role-play the part of an elected official during the decision scenarios. This study is the first research in political science to compare directly elected officials' and everyday citizens' political decision-making. An important debate revolves around the idea of whether elected officials are "trustees" who use insight and information to make decisions on our behalf or "delegates" who merely act as stand-ins for constituents. Either way, citizens implicitly trust elected officials to make decisions that are at least as good, if not better than what they themselves might do. Because we know little about the similarities and differences in individuals' political decision-making, we can only speculate what a more direct form of democracy would look like compared to our present system of indirect democracy. This project contributes to this important goal of determining the best way for citizens to have their preferences reflected in public policy.